So when is a chicken not a chicken? When it ducks!

You might be wondering how in the world that pathetic old joke is relevant to those spinning little (or big) fans in your computer case. If you’re a custom PC builder, be it for the sweet sound of silence, or for some rage against the machine overclocking, if there’s one thing that you know, it’s fans. Electronics don’t like to be hot, and whether it’s moving air over a heatsink or moving air over a liquid cooling radiator, at some point you just have to transfer the heat that computer parts generate into the air. That means you need Ye Olde Whirling Dervish, AKA a fan.

But fans are tricky. You’re often limited to the size of the fan that you can use, which reduces their efficiency. The speed that they run at and the design of the fan blades determine all sorts of factors from the amount of air moved, to the pressure of the air, to the focus cone of how the air moves, to the amount of power the fans consume, to the noise that they make as the blades spin around going whir whir whir. And then there’s the bearing design. How long will the fan really last? When it comes to PCs, fans are a tricky business!

But what if your fan … wasn’t a fan?

General Electric has developed an interesting novel approach to moving air in consumer electronics, which they based not on Ye Olde Whirling Dervish, but on a bellows. Taking a concept from their commercial jet engines, GE used tiny ceramic piezoelectronics and two 40mm x 40mm metal plates to make what they call a Dual Piezo Cooling Jet (DCJ).

The little buggers are smaller than fans, move more air, use less electricity, and make so little noise as to be virtually inaudible. And with no bearings to grind, in theory they’ll last longer too! Allegedly they don’t even gather dust. In theory they’re better all-around than any fan.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Sounds great! Where can I get a DCJ?” that’s where problems start to come in. Because GE isn’t really interested in manufacturing and selling the DCJs themselves. They’re only promoting the intellectual property. GE is presently demonstrating DCJs to manufacturers and so far have licensed the design to only one company: Fujikura LTD of Japan. So it may be some time yet before you can buy one.

There’s also another problem: the way that they work. As you watch their video, you realize one really important thing, DCJs are thin. Like really really thin. Sure, they create a jet of air, but how often in a big PC case do you need a really tiny Jetstream? If you want a big fan, or need to cover a lot of area, the DCJ may not be for you. They look to create a very concentrated little jetstream. Sure, it moves air, but how many of the little buggers do you need to cover as much area as you want? And in the case of an exhaust fan, what’ll it feel like to be the person who dares to walk behind the computer? So there may be a few features that need tweaking for PC use. It’s a design that’ll work great in super-thin devices, like smartphones, tablets, and ultrabooks. I’m not so convinced about larger consumer electronics though. Not without a serious rethink of how air moves in the device. I don’t see someone fitting a DCJ into any traditional fan slot. They just work too differently, moving air along a completely different axis.

I’m also not sure that I like the idea of my cellphone having a fan.

Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? We could find that five years from now the Dual Piezo Cooling Jet may just have completely revolutionized consumer electronics airflow designs. I can already see a few of my old theoretical computer case designs that I’d been thinking about for silence that didn’t work well with traditional spinning fans would work quite the treat with DCJs. They’d finally become reasonable designs. Makes me wish I had the money to patent a few case designs and manufacture them.

It also makes me wonder, if they can move air so much more efficiently, and air is just a fluid (as far as the physics of fluid dynamics are concerned) how about an adaptation to water? And if that works, what about other liquids? From better water cooling rigs in PCs to fuel injection in cars, just how many things could DCJs actually revolutionize? Has anyone at GE even thought through all of the potential implications and applications?

And just how big can these be made and still work right?

Beats me! But I can’t wait to find out.

HP TouchSmart tm2t

I know, as reviews go this review of the HP TouchSmart tm2t is pretty far behind the times. (I don’t even think Hewlett-Packard actually sells the TouchSmart tm2t anymore.) But I’ve been using one of these little buggers at work now for 6 months (actually, two of them by this point), and I’ve definitely formed some opinions.

First off, the concept: The HP TouchSmart is a laptop, notebook, whatever you want to call it. Except it has one very important twist, the monitor can be rotated to switch it into a tablet form factor. Sort of. As obviously the little multitasking gizmo is going to be thicker than an actual tablet-by-design because it puts casing fully around the display and around the laptop case, and because it has a keyboard and touchpad-mouse. These things take up space and add weight that a real tablet doesn’t have to bother with. And let me just say that in practice, it matters.

Not only is the HP TouchSmart tm2t thicker than a tablet because of its extra bits, but there’s a weird hump for the battery on the far edge of the case that extends the bottom out by quite a bit. This makes it rather awkward to hold, and to balance on anything that isn’t a very flat hard surface. So while it sits quite well on a desk or a table, it is definitely not a pleasure to hold, and it tends to topple over on your lap. Especially if you want to actually touch the touchscreen, which rather is half the point of the HP TouchSmart tm2t. Hence the name and all.

And here’s where my usage of it comes in. At work I’m developing some touchscreen-based software. So a laptop to bring to meetings, that can be converted into a tablet form factor for doing testing on, is a very handy concept. That’s why the company ordered the first one, for me to prototype the software with.

Let me just say that the second one the company ordered was against my recommendation.

Here’s why:

It’s a twitchy flaky little son of a laptop.

While the touchscreen does indeed perform multitouch, and in its own right do so fairly well, that’s only when the touchscreen actually works. Which is most of the time … but not all of the time. No, every so often the touchscreen goes into La La Land and ignores you completely for a handful of seconds. During which time you could beat on it and it’d do absolutely nothing. Frankly, I don’t know if this is a hardware issue or some kind of sleep state built into the drivers or what, but whatever the culprit is, it’s annoying.

That aside, how is the touchscreen itself? Meh. It’s okay. No more, no less. Certainly I’ve used worse. But frankly, I’ve also used much much better. The accuracy is only so-so, as is the responsiveness. It’s enough to generally work, but if you’ve ever had the pleasure of a well-designed touchscreen you’ll find using it quite … frustrating.

Now, the touchscreen also has a pen input, and the HP TouchSmart tm2t does come with a stylus. Actually, here’s one of the really annoying things about the HP TouchSmart tm2t – the lanyard holding the stylus. This thin but stiff string just sticks out of the side. It catches on everything. It gets in the way all the time. It’s a real pain in the asterisk and obviously an afterthought at best. You’ll be very tempted to just remove it. (Which I’ve done.) But the stylus pen bay does not hold that pen in very solidly. In fact, even though it has a click-lock-eject type mechanism to keep the stylus docked when you don’t need it, and to make it easy to grab when you do, the stylus in fact is exposed on the bottom and can easily catch on things. And presumably by design, while it kind-of locks in place, it’s not a very firm hold and will let you yank it right out. Meaning that should you remove the lanyard from your HP TouchSmart tm2t, you’re probably going to lose that stylus at some point.

Which, frankly, is no loss.

Okay, so yes, the HP TouchSmart tm2t does become much more responsive and accurate when you use a stylus instead of a finger. In fact it’s practically psychic in that you can hold the stylus a good distance from the touchscreen. You really don’t need to “touch” the screen with the stylus at all. And the right-click feature of the stylus is a lot faster than holding your finger in place for a few seconds while Windows decides that you’re right-clicking instead of left-clicking. So you’d think the stylus would be all sunshine and lollipops compared to actual touching with a finger.

Except the stylus is utter crap. It’s cheap. It feels flimsy. And honestly, who wants to whip out a pen every time they try to use the touchscreen? Maybe on a little phone or PDA with a tiny screen size and ham-hands, but not on this 12.1 inch screen. HP really flubbed on this one. With such a nice artistic case with an etched design on the HP TouchSmart tm2t, you’d think that HP had paid attention to detail. But once you pull out the stylus you’ll be convinced that in fact they cut some serious corners.

And while we’re on bad designs of the touchscreen, let’s talk about the rotate-to-tablet feature itself. This is essentially the lynchpin of the hardware design, that with a twist you can convert the HP TouchSmart tm2t from a notebook into a tablet. And ignoring the not-very-solid feel of this mechanic itself (because even though it doesn’t feel very secure, it has yet to actually break, so maybe it is engineer more solidly than it gives the impression of), the software lets you down here. Because when you rotate your screen 180 degrees, you’d expect that it automatically detects this and rotates it in Windows so that you’re not suddenly using an upside-down screen. It fails badly here. Maybe half of the time (at best) it actually does detect this and do it for you. The rest of the time, it does detect it, goes into thinking-about-rotate-mode, but then fails to rotate the screen. And if you ever update the drivers, this failure rate goes into 100% failure, where it never rotates the screen for you. So make sure to put your graphics driver controls in a handy place, because you’re going to have to rotate the screen manually a lot.

Of course using the touchscreen isn’t the HP TouchSmart tm2t’s only source of flaky performance. The touchpad (that little mouse replacement device) is just as bad. It quite often just completely ignores your attempts to left-click by tapping the pad component itself. So if you don’t want to drive yourself crazy, you’ll have to go back in time to when you actually had to use the left and right buttons. Which means stretching your thumb down while you navigate with your finger. Which might be fine for some folks, but honestly induced cramps in my less-than-stretchy hand. And let’s face it, is a huge step backwards in notebook usability.

So basically, if you have an HP TouchSmart tm2t, in spite of it having a touchpad and being designed around a rotatable touch screen, if you use it regularly you might as well get yourself a freaking mouse for all of the flubs in HP’s hardware. It’s that bad. And it completely defeats the purpose of the device, which is to be finger-friendly. What is the point of a TouchSmart that you don’t want to touch?

Of course it has other nuisances as well. The HP-installed software meant to enhance your computing experience I found to be rather annoying, gimmicky, and quickly went to remove. And I do mean all of it. From their TouchSmart software, to their support assistant nagware (Is HP not aware that Windows 7 already nags you enough about these things?), there wasn’t a thing that HP added that I found actually helped me in any way. Maybe some computing novices or young artistic types might find some of it useful or entertaining, but as a professional user, I found it all cumbersome and anti-productive. What’s even worse, even after trying to disable it, I found some of it would still revive itself at inconvenient times. Which necessitated complete removal.

Which was a Bad Thing.

For example, the webcam seemed to only be usable through the TouchSmart interface. No standard Windows drivers? Say what? Yeah. HP’s software development is just that bad.

Which should come as no surprise really, as what company could possibly buy WebOS from Palm and then completely fail to make it marketable in the phone/tablet market by keeping it so out of date / out of touch with reality?

HP + software development = Bad Things.

And honestly, I’ve yet to own and/or use an HP laptop of any kind from any era that has ever won me over. They seem to always be cutting corners somewhere, or just flat out failing to impress. At least with Dell you have a 50/50 shot of it being a good device. But HP is a 0% win in my experience. Maybe I’ve just had bad luck, but I doubt it. One such laptop years back had the hard drive fail so many times that I was getting to a first-name basis with the folks they hired in India to do support. And amazingly, once I swapped that HD out for one of my own purchasing, miraculously the crashes and failures stopped. HP has always cut corners, and likely will always cut corners, in my opinion. I don’t trust their hardware as far as I can throw it and almost never recommend it in any professional setting unless I’m really up against a wall.

And frankly, in this, the HP TouchSmart tm2t is very much a Hewlett-Packard product. It fails in everything it was meant to be good at. Because of its flaky touchpad and poor ergonomics It fails as a notebook. Because of its flaky touch screen and poor ergonomics it fails as a tablet. It feels cheap. The stylus is shoddy and a pleasure to loose once you remove the annoying lanyard tethering it in place. The software components let you down. The drivers/firmware are lacking. The speakers produce weak sound of poor quality. The cooling fans spin up to annoying sound levels at minimal provocation. And basically, the HP TouchSmart tm2t is a product to avoid when at all possible.

And if you think maybe I just got a faulty product, let me remind you again that I’ve been using two of them now, the second definitely of a later production than the first, and in their faults they are really quite consistent. So these failures are not accidental things in manufacturing, but by design and across the product line.

HP could have done better.

A blind chipmunk could have done better.

The only really positive things to say about the HP TouchSmart tm2t are that the keyboard felt nice, and that the cover design was artistic.

In that the HP TouchSmart tm2t at least generally worked, I give it a score of 2 flaky touch devices out of five. If you can find any other hybrid notebook/tablet PC to meet your needs, by all means go with that instead.

Microsoft would like to remind us that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 support has ended, and if you’d like support on Vista, you really should upgrade (for free) from SP1 to SP2. It’s easy. Just run Windows Update.

Or, better yet, upgrade to Windows 7. (Microsoft’s suggestion, not mine. See?)

As self-serving as Microsoft’s suggestion of upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 may be, I find myself in the rare position of actually agreeing with them on that. Yes, it costs money, but let’s face it, Windows Vista is a joke. It’s Windows ME2. Do you really want to be stuck on it?

Well, your choice. Either way, Microsoft’s point is that Windows Vista SP1 is officially dead to them.

No surprises there, as Microsoft probably wishes everyone would just forget that Windows Vista ever existed. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if support of Windows Vista ended with Service Pack 2 and Windows XP actually outlived it!

Speaking of, if you’re one of those people holding on to dear life to Windows XP (and I even fall into that category to some extent) the Windows XP support will end… One day… Maybe… If it isn’t extended again. I guess over in MS World, now that Windows 7 has finally given people something stable and usable to upgrade to (since Windows Vista failed miserably on that front) we’re all supposed to upgrade to Windows 7. (Except for those of us who can’t, of course.)

Here’s the really odd thing though. Microsoft claims that Windows XP will indeed die. It has less than 1000 days less of its extended support. Officially, on the 8th of April, 2014, Microsoft will no longer provide security patches, hotfixes, etc. for any version of Windows XP. I get that. It’s something of a bummer for those of us using it on low-powered low-memory laptops and netbooks where Windows 7 is a less-than-convincing “upgrade”, leaving us … well, SoL. Not to mention those of us just keeping old PCs alive! It’d be one thing if Windows 7 could actually run as well as Windows XP on an old or budget system, but it’s another thing entirely when it can’t, and in even more cases where Windows 7 can’t be installed on the box at all!

But things take an even stranger turn, because along come the rumors and innuendo of Windows 8. Microsoft exec Tami Reller just told folks at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 that if a PC could run Windows 7, it could also run Windows 8. It’s an assurance to PC makers (and consumers) that anyone who is running Windows 7 now will be able to upgrade easily to Windows 8. You won’t have to worry about memory or processor speed at all. (Which could be a Microsoft first since it left the concept of Windows as a DOS shell behind!)

However, that raises an odd question in my mind: What about the army of folks still on Windows XP? Can they upgrade to Windows 8?

Why do I ask that?

Why do I think that they even could if they can’t upgrade to Windows 7?

Simple!

Windows 8, supposedly, will not just be available for your PC, but also for your ARM-based tablet! And let’s face it, Android tablets are not running Windows 7 for a reason. (Well, a couple of them.) It’s not just a matter of ARM vs. x86, but also of resources. Linux and Linux-based OSes such as Meego, sure. Windows 7? Nuh-uh!

And Intel is still pushing hard for Atom to replace ARM in Android tablet manufacturer’s minds. Will it? I doubt it. It’s like swatting a fly with a … hardcover book. But a Windows 7 tablet, that’d be spiffy … if it could run faster than molasses in January. Which it can’t. (I would know, as I have an Atom-based tablet. I technically can install, but if I thought it was already slow running Windows XP…)

But if Windows 8 could run well on low resources like on a tablet?

Because let’s face it, Windows is a resource hog compared to Android or iOS as an operating system goes. We’re even seeing some grumbling from WebOS tablet users that the OS itself is sluggish. The performance of the OS on a dinky little tablet processor makes a world of difference. One that Windows 7 just can’t even try to compete. So if Microsoft wants people to actually bother putting Windows 8 on tablets, it’s going to have to trim up that kernel. Will Windows 8 be split into two worlds: PC running kernel-heavy like Windows always is and tablet running kernel-lite like Windows CE or Windows PHONE 7? Or will Windows 8 actually be lean by design and work for anyone and everyone equally well with the same kernel for all?

If the latter then it would be a Microsoft first! Which makes me very doubtful.

But it would be an extremely welcome change, especially as a lightweight kernel from Microsoft that still ran PC software might even just give all of those aging computers running Windows XP an actual upgrade path! If Microsoft were interested in listening to what customers want (instead of just telling us what we need) Windows 8 could possibly be the savior of Windows XP users who would like to upgrade, if only Microsoft would make an OS that they could actually upgrade to.

I wouldn’t hold my breath on it though. Because that just isn’t the Microsoft way of doing things. Even if it would make sense. And sales. Lots and lots of sales.

Solid State Drives (SSDs), they’re the best thing since sliced bread … at least for mobile computing.  With no moving parts, they’re supposed to be longer lasting and impervious to being banged around and dropped, ideally suited for portable computing devices like laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, UMPCs, and even smartphones.

But are they really better than g-force damage-prone traditional Hard Drives (HDs)?

According to an article from the Mac Observer, using information gleaned from a French source, the answer is: no.

Of course that’s the quick and easy answer.  Keep in mind, the source is hardly a broad industry-wide examination of SSD vs. HD, so it’s not really so definitive.  It does however offer a basis for the beginning of an examination, and the results are actually quite surprising.  The traditional hard drive in their study had a failure rate of 1.94%, where as the solid state drive had a higher failure rate of 2.05%.  The difference is not staggering, but it is surprising.

Traditional hard drives spin platters around at high speeds, much like record players (or for you young folk, CD players) using heads to read and write information magnetically.  All of this movement, the spinning platters and more often, the moving heads, needs to be incredibly precise.  Movement can disrupt the process, especially high g-force impacts such as dropping the hard drive.  (Or the device containing the hard drive.)  Errors happen, as do failures.  Even though the technology in hard drives has improved dramatically over the years, in an ever increasing effort to mitigate errors and damage from g-forces as hard drives are moved or dropped, nothing is ever 100% fool proof.  So the use of these highly mechanical hard drives in a laptop or netbook that is going to be jostled around, tossed, dropped, etc. has been seen as something less than desirable with the advent of solid state drives.

Because SSDs do not operate on the same principle.  Instead of spinning platters and moving heads, SSDs just have memory chips, lots and lots of memory chips.  Like USB flash drives on steroids, SSDs are just one big electronic memory storage device with no moving parts.  They can be juggled, tossed, dropped, without affecting them or the data stored in memory.  So this would make them perfect for portable computing, right?

Well, maybe not!

They may not have mechanical failures, but apparently they still have failures all their own regardless of g-forces.  In at least this one data mining study, SSDs have more failures in fact than all of those laptops with HDs being tossed about and dropped.

Granted, SSDs are still rather in their infancy, compared to the long-in-the-tooth HD.  So hopefully SSD technology will continue to improve, becoming far more reliable.  The idea, theoretically, holds a lot of merit for portable computing.

But is it worth the considerable cost to replace your netbook’s traditional HD with a SSD?  The numbers, so far, don’t really suggest doing this.  You’d likely be better off saving money and investing in a traditional hard drive that you can be sure of the quality of, should the one that came in your device fail.  At least for now, while SSD technology is still so new.  That seems to be what the numbers show.

One day though, when solid state drives are sufficiently iteratively improved, I’d be surprised if anyone still used hard drives in laptops.  I can see their merit in stationary computers like desktops and servers, but for portable computing SSDs are the way to go.

Eventually.

Just not, apparently, today.

Introduced to Pace University in New York a year ago by Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, the Kindle DX was meant to be the ultimate tool for college students.  It’s very readable nearly 10-inch screen and large storage capacity were supposed to make it the ideal choice for replacing paper books with electronic ones.

But is it?

In a test program introduced to various college campuses around the US last fall, Amazon.com has been handing out the Kindle DX to students and asking for their feedback.  And so far, the answer is a resounding, “No.”

A whopping 80% of college students in the test program are saying that they would not recommend the Kindle DX  as a classroom study aid.

There are a number of complaints, but the largest of them fall thusly:

• You can’t scribble notes into the margins.
• You can’t easily highlight passages.
• You can’t view graphs and charts in the color they’re meant to be in.
• Flipping back and forth between pages is too slow.
• The bookmarking function to let you flip between important sections in a book is buggy.

Anyone who has studied in college can easily attest to these veritable necessities in using a book.  Studying from textbooks is not a simple linear read, from a page to the next page to the next.  Studying is a complex procedure in which one goes back and forth, highlights important passages, adds notes of their own, sticky-note-bookmarks important sections, and reads and re-reads and add more notes to the same important sections repeatedly.  Quickly.  Easily.

But not if you’re using an e-book reader.  And definitely not on the Amazon Kindle DX.

In theory, other e-book readers, or even updates to Amazon’s Kindle line, might eventually fix some of these problems.  Bookmarking could be done better.  Page turning could be made faster.  Notes, possibly, could even be scribbled into e-margins.  And color, well color is already available on e-book readers not using e-ink.  And on devices like Apple’s iPad.

But will this actually make these electronic devices as good as a real print book?  Can e-books ever be as good as paper for a college student?

And will Digital Rights Management (DRM), making it impossible to resell old books, be a benefit to the industry, as some propose, or a financially crippling hindrance to budget-minded students?

The usefulness of e-books at schools is very much in question.

And then there’s the price.  Maybe if Amazon’s Kindle DX didn’t have competing products that sold for less.  But even then, at almost five hundred dollars, one could buy Amazon’s Kindle DX that is basically only an e-book reader, or one could buy an Apple iPad that can run all sorts of Apps, including ones to read e-books.  Or heck, one could even buy various UMPCs and touchscreen laptops, capable of running actual software applications like MS Office for writing their papers on as well as e-book software and far more.

So given that choice why would any college student buy the Kindle DX then?